Y Combinator

Avni Patel Thompson founded Poppy, which helped parents book the best caregivers. They went through the YC Winter 2016 batch and recently shut down. Avni asked to come on the podcast to talk about what the process of shutting down was like.

Kat Manalac is a partner at YC.

You can find Avni on Twitter at @APatelThompson and Kat at @KatManalac.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - @CraigCannon.

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Topics

00:35 - Kat’s intro

01:15 - Avni’s intro

2:15 - When did it become clear that scaling Poppy wasn’t working?

5:50 - Experiments Avni tried with Poppy

9:55 - The last six months of runway

13:25 - Choosing to shut Poppy down

17:25 - Pivot or shut down?

20:10 - Who did Avni have these hard conversations with?

24:35 - Communicating with investors during the process of shutting down

31:20 - How does Avni feel since shutting down Poppy?

38:30 - Tying self-worth to your accomplishments and how it feels after shutting down

39:30 - “This is what trying looks like.”

44:00 - The effects of having raised money

46:00 - Starting to think about what’s next

49:00 - Struggling with unstructured nothing

49:45 - Kindness